UK government trial of Microsoft's M365 Copilot finds no clear productivity boost
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36865760
Ugh, thought this could've referred to a Trial as in "All rise for the judge", not Trial as in "Your free trial has expired".
We're way overdue to put AIs on former trials.
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So a followup email with meeting minutes written by someone actually there..
GenZ thinks they invented interns lol
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Yeah, no shit. But they nearly doubled the price. I canceled my membership, but I doubt enough did to actually matter.
I was fine paying $60 a year for Office. I was never gonna use the AI stuff. When they said it was $100, I bailed. So now they don't get the $60. But enough people will go on paying that they will actually make more money on Office in the next year, not less.
Not enough people are willing to vote with their wallets or even their feet to effect any meaningful change. At least not when it comes to their tech toys.
I have been using Libre office for a while now and it's superior to office in every way.
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Lots of LLM shills in these comments. I hope your work doesn't value reality/accuracy.
It helps me get there more often than not, anywhere from programming I'm unfamiliar with to brainstorming in graphic design. I see a lot of anti-AI folks diss it without considering how it's actually used. It's a tool like any other, and you get what you make of it.
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That depends on the issue. Sometimes it's a lack of training, sometimes it's obtuse software. That's a call the product owner needs to make.
For something like AI, it does take some practice to learn what it's good at and what it's not good at. So there's always going to be some amount of training needed before user complaints should be taken at face value. That's true for most tools, I wouldn't expect someone to jump in to my workflow and be productive, because many of the tools I use require a fair amount of learning to use properly. That doesn't mean the tools are bad, it just means they're complex.
Are you the person (alt) I was asking this of?
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Are you the person (alt) I was asking this of?
No. Is that a problem?
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No. Is that a problem?
Yes, because I was talking to the other person who’s been all over this thread talking about their specific experience.
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cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/36865760
I mean.. it's software. It's only as good as you leverage it.
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"Regular office work" is a pretty broad category. Yeah, it's probably not useful in retrieving records for someone or processing forms, but it should be useful for anything that requires research.
not sure there is any research done by people using office suite...
it sounds like you are conflating LLM in general with the crappy copilot that MS offers with the office suite
an LLM could be useful for research of large (large) datasets... Copilot would not be
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not sure there is any research done by people using office suite...
it sounds like you are conflating LLM in general with the crappy copilot that MS offers with the office suite
an LLM could be useful for research of large (large) datasets... Copilot would not be
I don't know much about copilot, but some quick research shows it uses GPT-5 for the chat feature. I assume that's what's meant by the average queries in the article.
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It doesn't have to, you can run LLMs locally. We do at my org, and we only have a few dozen people using it, and it's running on relatively modest hardware (Mac Mini for smaller models, Mac Studio for larger models).
Yeah, shitty toy ones. This here is about productivity, not about a hobby. And not even real state-of-the-art models were able to actually give a productivity advantage.
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So a followup email with meeting minutes written by someone actually there..
The skills of both writing useful minutes and prioritizing actually sending them out are frustratingly rare. An average meeting with five or six people has even odds of not including someone with both of those skills. I can see where reliably having a mediocre AI summary might be an advantage over sometimes having superb human-written minutes and sometimes having nothing.
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In all your software deployments did you blame the users for not getting it or did you redesign the software because it sucked (according to your users)?
I've occasionally been part of training hourly workers on software new to them. Having really, really detailed work instructions and walking through all the steps with themthe first time has helped me win over people who were initially really opposed to the products.
My experience with salaried workers has been they are more likely to try new software on their own, but if they don't have much flexible time they usually choose to keep doing the established less efficient routine over investing one-time learning curve and setup time to start a new more efficient routine. Myself included - I have for many years been aware of software my employer provides that would reduce the time spent on regular tasks, but I know the learning curve and setup is in the dozens of hours, and I haven't carved out time to do that.
So to answer the question, neither. The problem may be neither the software nor the users, but something else about the work environment.
